Salamander SharePoint

OneNote Class Notebooks have been a hit in Office 365 for Education and are being heavily promoted by Microsoft. They have a personal workspace for every student, a content library for hand-outs, and a collaboration space for lessons and creative activities.

Microsoft have just announced the launch of the new OneNote Class Notebook API for Office 365. I’m pleased to announce that we have also added support for creating and maintaining Class Notebooks to Salamander Active Directory and Salamander SharePoint.

This means that we can automate the creation of Class Notebooks directory from your MIS, whether it’s SIMs, Facility, iSAMS, Pass or any other MIS. It will also add and remove students and teachers as the membership changes in the MIS.

This allows central provisioning and rollout of Class Notebooks with no manual intervention required by teachers – they can just get on with teaching.

We can create the Notebooks in several different locations:

In the Teachers’ OneDrives.

In SharePoint sites. Ideal if using class sites.

Within the new Office 365 Groups.

In a shared OneDrive.

This is all completely configurable, as are all our products, so we can configure it to whatever works best for your school. We can even automatically archive the Notebooks at the end of the year, before building a new set for the new academic year.

From their website: “PowerSchool plays a central role in K12 education, serving as the hub of customers’ education ecosystems with robust features and APIs that allow education stakeholders to effectively manage school processes and student data and connect education technologies relied upon in school offices and classrooms alike.”

So we can now integrate PowerSchool with Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, Office 365 and Google Apps, ensuring that your users, groups and timetables are always up to date. This means that as pupil & staff move in and out of your school, their accounts can be automatically created, security groups and distribution lists created and updated, and timetables synchronized to Exchange or Google Calendar together with a multitude of other actions.

From their website: “SchoolBase® is different to other education management systems. It has been uniquely built so that it can be tailored to meet your needs. If you’re a school who needs to organise enrichment as part of your curriculum or a group looking to centrally manage student data – SchoolBase will mould to your requirements.”

We can now integrate SchoolBase with Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, Office 365 and Google Apps, ensuring that your users, groups and timetables are always up to date. This means that as pupil & staff move in and out of your school, their accounts can be automatically created, security groups and distribution lists created and updated, and timetables synchronized to Exchange or Google Calendar together with a multitude of other actions.

From their website: “Maze is a complete, fully customisable School Management System ideal for schools of all sizes. Schools choose Maze because it assists them in efficiently managing all back office processes in one integrated system.

Maze provides access to appropriate information and functions to all members of your school community, including school administrators, school leaders, academic staff and parents.

We can now integrate Maze with Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, Office 365 and Google Apps, ensuring that your users, groups and timetables are always up to date. This means that as pupil & staff move in and out of your school, their accounts can be automatically created, security groups and distribution lists created and updated, and timetables synchronized to Exchange or Google Calendar together with a multitude of other actions.

We also provide partial support for Maze for our Online Reporting web parts.

I recently helped a customer install the Sims Profile Details Web Part. I actually became aware of his problem after spotting his post on Edugeek. It looked like it would be quite simple to solve and as he was an existing customer, even though I had nothing to do with his SLG I offered to help.

From the description it looked like the web part needed a property stating the spell check page set before it could be displayed. In fact the web part errored so badly that the whole page could not display and you had to go to the web part maintenance page to remove it before you could view it again. I knocked up a quick utility to instantiate the web part, set the appropriate property and then add it to the page. It took a bit of time to get the configuration settings exactly right – at one point I had it appearing above the page title!, but when I got them right it went straight on.

One of the reasons I wanted to help out, was that the next piece of work for Salamander SharePoint is to add and maintain web parts. This was a great proof of concept for adding web parts to a page, and I’ve now got it integrated into the core product.